ACTRESS Lucy Punch had not worked for a year and was on the verge of packing it in when she got the call that changed her life: the offer of a plum part in the latest Woody Allen film.

“I was broke, terribly stressed and depressed and close to giving up,” she says, her natural ebullience fully restored.

“My brother said I should go travelling and my mother was telling me to do a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Barcelona.”

A future teaching foreign students was averted when Lucy, a gifted comedy actress with a clutch of TV credits to her name, landed the show-stopping part of a gold-digging escort girl who gets her claws into Sir Anthony Hopkins in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger.

The news seemed even more surprising given that Allen’s first choice for the part was the Oscar-winning A-lister, Nicole Kidman. Lucy, 33, had originally auditioned for the role and even booked a ticket to New York to meet Allen when she heard that he had cast Ms Kidman.

“I got a call in the middle of the night saying: ‘Don’t come to New York, he’s given the part to someone else,’ and I was devastated but when I found out it was Nicole I was more understanding. I can’t compare myself to her.”

A stamp of approval from Woody and doors open

Actress Lucy Punch

When Ms Kidman subsequently dropped out Lucy got the part and one can only imagine the whooping and hollering that ensued.

Effervescent and articulate, Lucy exudes excitement and gratitude at her good fortune, knowing that the call from Allen changed her status in the acting world overnight. “A stamp of approval from Woody and doors open,” says Lucy.

“The following year I worked non-stop. I still had to fight for parts but before I wouldn’t even have had a chance to get in the room.”

Now based in Los Angeles and on every casting agent’s wish list, she landed roles opposite Steve Carrell in Dinner For Schmucks and alongside Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake in the upcoming comedy Bad Teacher.

“I’d be on the phone to my mother and telling her about having cappuccinos with Cameron and Justin and she would say: ‘Lucy, can you hear yourself? This conversation is complete madness.’ ”

Lucy, I imagine, was completely unfazed. After all, what could match the intimidation of finding herself on a Woody Allen set, as the replacement for Nicole Kidman, with a heap of A-list stars (the cast included Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin and Antonio Banderas)?

What is more, Allen is a notoriously uncommunicative and retiring director and Lucy only met him and Anthony Hopkins on the first day of shooting.

“It was such an unusual experience,” she recalls. “I met Woody and Anthony for about a minute before we were all on set. Neither of them like talking about the script or the part. They don’t even like rehearsing. It’s just: ‘wait until the cameras are rolling.’ ”

Lucy held her nerve, even indulging her natural talent for improvisation after squeezing into some hilariously tacky outfits to play escort-girl-on-the-make Charmaine.

“It feels presumptuous to change one of Woody Allen’s lines but he’s a 70-something New Yorker and Charmaine is a chavvy Londoner. She would have a certain way of speaking, certain turns of phrase, and I got to really say what I wanted. I had the luxury of tailoring the part to myself.”

Only on one occasion did Allen snap at her improvised efforts telling her: “you’re not saying anything better than I’ve written.”

Lucy says she was “absolutely terrified”. “I was out of my mind but then I came up with a load of nonsense and it seemed to work.”

The picture explores the extent to which people delude themselves to get through life and is one of Allen’s most enjoyable in years, thought-provoking and funny. Lucy hasn’t got much truck with its rather miserable message that dreams rarely, if ever, come true.

“I think fantastic dreams do come true but they don’t unless you really believe in them, like me getting that part.

“Truthfully I should never have got it. It was supposed to be for a movie star. Woody could have had anyone he wanted but every time I went in to audition I just had a feeling in my stomach: ‘This is my part.’ He had no idea who I was but I believed in myself and believed in the dream.”

Giving a hint of where some of her on-screen characters’ crazed zest comes from, she adds: “If you’ve got some talent to back it up, anything incredible that one achieves takes a kind of madness.

“I also think: ‘Why not?’ Life is pretty tough and grey. Why not colour it with some daydreams?”

Lucy’s daydreams began in her childhood in south-west London; she knew she wanted to act from the age of five, or at least knew she loved doing it (a younger brother, she says, was virtually mute for years in her shadow).

She competed for parts in the school plays at Godolphin & Latymer girls’ school in Hammersmith and then dropped out of University College London, where she was studying French and History of Art, after landing a part in the French and Saunders sitcom Let Them Eat Cake.

“I was so delighted to suddenly be an actress that if anyone asked what I did I rather perversely said I was a student because I didn’t want to sound smug or full of myself. People probably wouldn’t have cared less but to me it was the most exciting thing in the world.”

Despite some high-profile TV roles in the likes of Doc Martin with Martin Clunes and the police comedy Vexed with Toby Stephens, her commitment would be severely tested over a decade of near misses and disappointments, including an American sitcom, The Class, from the creator of Friends, that failed to fly.

Cue that conversation with her mother about teaching English: “When I lost the part to Nicole Kidman she kept saying: ‘I can’t believe you thought you had a chance.’

“She’s very supportive but it was such a long shot that it takes a sort of barmy optimism to make these things happen. It’s almost a miracle really.”

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is in cinemas now. Read Henry’s review: page 60